FRAGMENTS BEHAVING AS ONE Consist of the artist book grandma blue walls and a large photo sculpture that has 350 little light bulbs and 700 two inch photographs arranged on a copper wire grid. The grid supplies electricity to light the bulbs. The artist book Grandma Blue Wall is bookended with a rock and a hard drive that plays an audio track of stories it has collected.
To me a rock and a hard drive are the same. Both serve as containers for memory. I collect rocks from events and times in my life that I don’t want to forget. The hard drive is also a container for memory or data that we collect. These objects removed from their original function are full of inaccessible data. But they hold their own stories.
The hard drive’s stories are more like vignettes than full stories allowing the viewer to fill in their own personal experiences as they flip through the book. Beyond the stories in the book I am talking about time and space. Each image occupies the same space, in this case a patch of dirt. Each page creates a slice in time through the vernacular imagery. The viewer collects past experiences as they move through the book and listen to the audio. As they look up they are confronted with a large glowing object, an unknown. At this moment what’s behind the curtain holds infinite possibilities, while the book has already collapsed into the past.
In the grid I use light to call attention and lead the viewer. To the viewer positioned in front of the book it is an unknown, the future experience. As we move around the curtain all the future possibilities collapse and we see another version of the book, this time from a macro perspective. One in which two time lines converge onto another unknown. Patterns emerge and are held together by the structure of an electrical grid. The light that we saw from the other side is still present although its meaning has changed. On this side of the grid light is the expenditure of energy need to make an entropic exchange of information. The exchanges in this case are the ideas represented in the images.
The human experience: through the people.
Nature: represented by the leaf.
Science: represented by the circuit board.
Time: in the image that creates a sign wave.
The Void of Space: through the black and white image of a wave.